Inner Experience and Neuroscience

Donald Price and Jim Barrell combine their considerable scientific expertise in a thought-provoking treatise on science and human experience. Neuroscience and psychology are interwoven in compelling arguments for integrating traditional scientific approaches with methods for studying internal experiences. Although focused on understanding human pain and suffering, the discussions relate to all sensory experiences—a must read for those interested in sensation or consciousness.

Barry E. Stein, Department of Neurobiology and Anatomy, Wake Forest School of Medicine

Emotion and pain are some of the most difficult phenomena to study scientifically. Donald Price and James Barrell have developed an innovative set of methods that promise to revolutionize the way that we approach the scientific investigation of such things. Integrating perspectives that draw from phenomenology, experiential sampling, psychophysics, and experimental psychology, and neuroscience, the authors make clear that we will not understand basic experiences without first understanding the variability of human meaning. I recommend this book to anyone interested in understanding consciousness.

Shaun Gallagher, Lillian and Morrie Moss Professor of Philosophy, University of Memphis

Donald Price and James Barrell have spent a lot of time experimenting on themselves. In doing so, their research has been powerfully informed by critical first-person experiential perspectives that typified the classic neuroscience investigations of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In Inner Experience and Neuroscience they lay out a conceptual framework that allows subject-investigators to integrate their own first-person experiential perspectives into rigorously designed modern neuroscience investigations. This work is critically important for anyone examining neural mechanisms supporting any consciously accessible dimension of the human experience.

Robert C. Coghill, Department of Neurobiology and Anatomy, Wake Forest School of Medicine